Indian advertisers spend Rs 72 crore on search marketing, says report

The IAMAI and Pinstorm presented a report on the state of search marketing in India by taking August 2006 as the time period and extrapolating it for the entire year. The report explores the scale and scope of the Indian search advertising industry and takes into account the search marketing on Google during August 2006.

To begin with, the report paints a rosy picture about the consumption of search by Indians. It says that over one billion Indians use search and the total clicks by users on sponsored links are about 4.8 million. The number of advertisers targeting this huge user base exceeded 40,000 people.

Around Rs 236 crore are spent by marketers on the online media to target Indian users, and out of this, Indian advertisers’ spends are about Rs 72 crore. There were 291 brands that spent more than Rs 10 lakh per year in India, while the number of Indian advertisers who spent that much was 90.

The average number of keywords bought by a brand was 42 and the report says that the average cost per click paid by an advertiser in India was Rs 16.20. Here are some analyses of a few sectors based on spends.

The top three sectors based on the estimated annual spends in India were travel, banking and financial services, general online companies, retail e-commerce, jobs, made-for-Adsense, etc. Of these, the general online category ranked first followed by retail e-commerce and then travel.

In the travel sector, the top three advertisers (based on spends) were Yahoo! Travel (Rs 1 crore), Lufthansa (around Rs 0.95 crore) and Make My Trip (around Rs 0.9 crore). In the banking and financial services sector, Citibank, with a spend of Rs 2.7 crore, HSBC, which spent Rs 1.1 crore, and ICICI Bank, with Rs 0.9 crore, emerged the top three spenders on search marketing.

Among the job search companies, Naukri, which spent Rs 8 crore, topped the list and Monster India, which spent around Rs 5.5 crore, came second, followed by Yahoo! Jobs India, the spends of which were as low as Rs 1 crore.

Among the dating and matrimony sectors, Shaadi.com spent around Rs 1.2 crore, followed by Jeevansathi, which spent Rs 0.6 crore. Among general advertisers, Google emerged the highest spender, spending around Rs 7 crore (in-house spend).

In the retail e-commerce sector, e-Bay spent the highest, Rs 9.5 crore, followed by Kijiji, which spent around Rs 1 crore on search marketing.

The report, according to Pinstorm, is fixated not on absolute numbers, but on relative comparisons.

© 2006 agencyfaqs!